


Absence, Abcess

by butthulu



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Addiction, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Character Study, Child Abandonment, Child Neglect, Drug Addiction, Drug Withdrawal, Emotional Healing, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Lawyer Terezi Pyrope, Rose Lalonde is Bad at Feelings, Self-Destruction, Self-Isolation, Self-Worth Issues, Solo Focus, Therapy, Vomiting, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:46:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27550234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butthulu/pseuds/butthulu
Summary: Rose is seventeen when her mother leaves and does not come back.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	Absence, Abcess

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to those whose parents left them, emotionally or literally, and did not come back.

Rose is seventeen when her mother leaves and does not come back.  
  


Leaving is not an uncommon occurrence. Her mother has been largely absent for most of her life, doing scientific work that she never bothers to explain to Rose, as if she’s unable to comprehend even the most basic of concepts involved, beyond “meteorology”. Rose would like to think that she’s a reasonably intelligent person, let alone reasonably intelligent for her age group, so the implication that she won’t understand, even if never outright said, is insulting. As a matter of spite, Rose hasn’t asked about it in years, although she still does want to know. Knowing things is never a _bad_ thing, and she will admit, when pressed, that she _is_ curious.  
  


In fact, knowing _something_ about the situation she’s in, pretty much anything, would be extremely welcome right about now.  
  


It’s not that Rose even really misses her. In fact, she’s sure that she must not have noticed her mother’s absence being abnormal for several days, as she’d thrown herself in writing the latest chapter of _Complacence of the Learned_ , her Harry Potter fanfiction(if one could even really call it that, with the amount of original characters and original worldbuilding she’s been doing), and hadn’t really come out for days. Her mother’s credit card has always been good for groceries, since her mother _stopped buying any_ and Rose no longer gets weird looks at the grocery store when she comes to the counter with a cart full of her own food, and Rose has quite the stash in her mini fridge, so she hasn’t had _reason_ to emerge until now. She’s long since learned that they mix like oil and water, so it’s best to keep apart as much as possible. Rose keeps to her part of the house- her room and bathroom- and her mother leaves her the hell alone.  
  
But the house is eerily quiet, more so than usual. It’s raining now, a susurrus of precipitation that has otherwise soothed her nerves. In the larger part of the house, it echoes. The space is empty. The space is not filled with anticipation. It is _empty_.

It is empty, and she is alone.

There are no dishes in the sink, when she checks. The dishwasher is full of plates that are not theirs, but were never retrieved, for some reason or another, by the catering company that her mother favors for “family dinners” that Rose never attends and only ever eats the leftovers of. It has occurred to her that this arrangement is exceedingly lonely, but, well, perhaps her mother should have tried harder to give her a reason to attend.

She puts the dishes away, for lack of anything better to do.

Perhaps this is what shock feels like, she muses.

Perhaps it is just feeling the absence. The absence of tension. The absence of needing a dire purpose to even be out here, in this kitchenette she has little reason to regularly visit. The absence causes listlessness.

Bewilderment.

Her mother always comes back, one way or another. Whether in a drunken haze, or a flurry of scientific paperwork she uses as an excuse to block Rose’s ability to navigate her own house by sitting at the living room coffee table and refusing to move in any meaningful manner except between the couch and the kitchenette, she always comes back. Her presence is rarely ever, if at _all_ ever, welcome. But she comes back.

Rose wonders whether she is going to come back. She is not certain how to untangle the tightening in her gut that results from her imagining this outcome. The way it makes her hands shake is familiar, even if the emotions are confusing and barbed, knotted together like the yarn she used to spend hours detangling before she bought something to keep that from happening. The way it makes her hands shake is something that experience tells her can be remedied with food, and disappearing into her room.

Maybe she is just hungry. Maybe that is why her core is tensed and painful, like it wants to retch but cannot figure out how to grasp the thing requiring evacuation from her abdomen. 

  
  
  
  


Food helps. 

=========

TG: and youre sure shes not coming back  
TT: It’s been three weeks, now. The longest she’s ever been gone has been two. I find it increasingly unlikely that she will return.  
TG: yeah but like  
TG: i dunno isnt that illegal  
TT: Do you really have any room to be arguing about the legality of the actions of my guardian, David?  
TG: ouch  
TG: first off  
TG: low blow  
TT: I suppose you would know everything about those, from first hand experience.  
TG: if youre going to be a pissy broad instead of your usual state of flighty broadness  
TG: well ill still talk to you im not going to block you or anything  
TG: but its not cool  
TT: Nothing about this situation is cool.  
TG: i mean  
TG: your mom is gone  
TG: isnt that what you wanted  
  
Rose sits back in her chair, wishing she could sink into the mantle of the earth and be melted into something useful, like peridotite. She hates hurting Dave’s feelings. He tries not to show it, but she can always tell, because she is specifically crafting her words to hurt him, and she has many years of practice doing so.  
  
_isnt that what you wanted_

Pressing the heels of her palms into her eyes yields no wisdom that could possibly begin to dissect that question, let alone craft a reasonable or coherent response. It just makes kaleidoscope flowers bloom across the insides of her eyelids, not-colors, almost visible, dancing and swimming senselessly through the field of black. This is a welcome reprieve from her thoughts, as she is able to simply _not think_ as she watches them. 

Of course, she has to reply sooner or later. But why choose ‘sooner’ when it’s such an unappealing option?  
  


Dave doesn’t get a reply for hours.

=========

EB: where do you think she is??? it’s weird for her to be gone so long, isn’t it?  
TT: Exceedingly.  
TT: Although, I’m sure she’ll be coming back eventually.  
TT: This is, after all, her house.  
TT: It’s not like she has anywhere else to live. That I know of, at least.  
EB: well… i mean, you guys are super rich, right?  
EB: you said she works for skaia net or something, and if you guys can afford to live in a mansion in freaking new york, she has to be able to like….  
EB: i dunno. buy another house somewhere else?  
TT: This thought * has * occurred to me, shockingly, because I am not devoid of a functioning brain.  
EB: i wasn’t trying to say you’re stupid, rose.  
TT: No, I know.  
TT: I’m sorry. I’m still on edge.  
TT: It’s been a month. She’s never gone for this long.  
EB: do you think something happened to her??  
EB: maybe she got hurt. or stranded, or something.  
TT: I don’t know. The amount of things I know about this situation is still resting at a superbly unhelpful 1: my mother is gone. Somewhere.  
EB: are you okay?  
EB: i mean, you have to be able to eat, are you eating? you aren’t starving, are you????  
EB: my dad says he’ll come get you if you are. it’s not a burden or anything.  
TT: That warms the cockles of my cold, black heart to hear. Your father is a very generous man.  
TT: I’m fine. I’m not starving.

She hasn’t starved in years.

There are different kinds of starving, she’s beginning to think.

=========

The house does not get any less empty. Rose attempts to spend time within it. No amount of wandering the halls like a particularly material ghost helps mitigate the feeling of being small, and alone.

She even enters her mother’s room. 

Rose isn’t sure what she expected to find. She knows the layout of it fairly well, despite entering it all of about four times that she can remember throughout her life. It’s not that the room was forbidden- her mother has been extremely lax, if anything, about where Rose may go and what she may do. Her mother’s room has simply never appealed to her, for the starkly obvious reason that it may, at any point, have contained her mother, and that was not a risk she was often willing to take. The bar is there- who has a bar in their bedroom?- and so is the bed. The bed is immaculately made. The corners are tucked. The top sheet is folded. The pillows are plump and stacked.  
  
The fact that it looks like a hotel bed fills Rose with a curious rage. 

Why she takes the main pillow from the floor after her fit of throwing it and the bedding around all over the place, and crawls into bed and holds it, inhaling the scent of alcohol and jasmine, and cries, she… isn’t sure. 

  
  
  
  


The pillow loses its scent after about three days of use. Rose discards it.

=========

Why did she leave? What was so wrong ~~with her~~ that her mother left? It’s been two months. Roxy should have returned by now. Surely she should have returned by now. Does she intend to ever return?  
  
Rose doesn’t have any answers.

=========

GG: rose it’s been like four months!!!  
GG: why are you still living there????  
GG: theres no reason for you to be there still  
GG: unless  
GG: rose you don’t think that she’s coming back do you?!?!?!?!  
TT: It’s a possibility.  
GG: ummm!!! yeah i guess, but like  
GG: theres a difference between possibility and probability, rose  
GG: it’s POSSIBLE your mom might come back, but….  
GG: i mean at this point do you really think it’s probable?  
TT: I don’t really care.  
GG: bullshit! you care about a lot of stuff rose and i know you care about your mom even if you say you don’t and you say you hate her!  
TT: I do hate her.  
GG: that’s still a kind of caring! and i dont think i would hate her in your shoes  
GG: i think i would be really sad  
GG: and upset, and hurt?  
TT: I don’t need you to tell me how I feel, Jade.  
TT: Thank you for your input.  
TT: I’m going to go make food for myself, now. I will talk to you later.  
GG: rose don’t ignore me!!  
  
\- tentacleTherapist [TT] is an idle chum! -  
  
GG: UGH!!!!

=========

Rose does not celebrate her birthday.

There is no cake that she ~~hates~~ ~~loves~~ ~~resents~~ may eat.

There are no candles.  
  
There are no presents that she doesn’t want and doesn’t like.

She turns eighteen without any sort of fanfare at all.

(And if this is because she has blocked all of her friends on Pesterchum because she doesn’t want to deal with their histrionics regarding her mother, then that is neither here nor there.)

=========

The house feels more and more like a mausoleum. Its hallways, labyrinthine and yet confining. Its vaulted ceilings, claustrophobic. She cannot drive; she has no license, she never learned. She cannot leave. Her schooling is nearly finished, nine months since her mother left. The time before her looms, as a dark and stormy horizon looms over the ships that face it. She does not know what she is going to do.  
  
She does not particularly care.

It’s fitting, that the house is a mausoleum, since she is the ghost that wanders its halls, an empty husk of the girl she feels that she must have been at some point. The morbid part of her wonders if it will be her tomb also, but she doesn’t give the thought much serious consideration.

Just because she has little reason to continue living does not mean she has any reason to die, either.

She is sure her friends must have moved on by now. That’s probably for the best.

=========

Her school hosts an in-person graduation ceremony, despite it being completely online. Rose is not sure why she attends. The taxi out to the city is hideously expensive, and the ceremony dull and awkward.  
  
She is the only one without anyone to congratulate her, afterwards.

The whole thing was entirely pointless, and Rose considers throwing her diploma in the trash. She only doesn’t because it’s legal documentation and she may need it, sometime in the nebulous future. It sits on the coffee table instead, discarded. She doesn’t look at it afterwards.

=========

Rose does not get any college letters because she does not check the mailbox at the end of the drive. Even when she walks the several miles to the nearest grocery store, she does not even spare it a glance. She has uninstalled Pesterchum on her computer, because Jade and Dave kept making alternate accounts to get around her blocks, and she was tired of it. She doesn’t want to deal with anyone, or anything. What can’t they understand about that?  
  
She’s alone. Her needs are taken care of by her mother’s seemingly bottomless bank account, and she has been left to her own devices. Permanently.  
  
She likes it this way.

=========

Rose still does not want to die. 

Rose also does not want to live.

Drinking is an easy way to sidestep this paradox. 

She spends much of her time knitting and crocheting progressively more complicated garments. At some point, she even makes a dress for herself. It is warm, and soft. Objectively speaking, it is a pleasing article.  
  
She doesn’t wear it. The buttons remind her of her mother.  
  
(She rips them out and throws them into the corner of her room and does not look at the failure again. She will make a better one. She has enough yarn.)

Everything reminds her of her mother. Including the alcohol that Rose steals from her mother’s room. This can’t be helped, really. Almost everything in the house reminds her of her mother, because she didn’t realize how much her mother _tainted_ everything until she was gone. Rose feels much better now that she’s gone. Everything is much better now that her mother is gone.  
  
(She does not think about the time she spent curled up in her mother’s bed, clinging to the last physical remnants of her. She does not think about the times she has cried in her own bed, wondering what _happened,_ what made her leave? What did Rose _do_? What _didn’t_ she do? Was she finally just not enough?)  
  
Nothing involving her mother matters much anymore, because she is gone. But it is difficult to move past the things that remind Rose of her anyways. 

Maybe it’s the house.

=========

Rose isn’t sure how, exactly, she finds her mother’s lawyer’s number. The woman sounds like she’s smoked at least a pack of cigarettes a day for the past twenty years. Her laughter sounds like a machine gun with a limp, and she laughs a lot.  
  
She does not laugh when Rose explains the situation, and asks to see the deed to the house.  
  
The lawyer comes to her, in the end. Rose does not have a way to reach the lawyer- Something Pyrope, she hasn’t paid much attention- and she is willing and able to pay the cost of the time spent driving to and from her house and the city. Pyrope does not take her offer. She says that she’ll do it for free. Rose insists that she pay Pyrope for the time spent giving her legal advice, at least, and Pyrope agrees to that.  
  
As it turns out, her mother had arranged her affairs before leaving. The fact that her departure and absence were premeditated makes Rose feel something. It has been a long time since she has felt anything, but she puts it aside so she can listen to her lawyer.  
  
Pyrope says that, among other things, including a transfer of ownership of her bank account when Rose turned eighteen, her mother left her the house.

Rose knows what she wants to do with it.

  
  
=========

Pyrope informs her over text that setting fire to her house, even if she owns it, _is_ felony arson. Rose has to think of another plan. She has no intent of going to jail.

Selling the place seems wrong.

Holding on to it, worse.

The amount of time Rose spends sober is decreasing. She’s never quite drunk. Just…. tipsy enough to not care or think about how much she hates this place, and hates the thought of leaving.

She does not remember to feel the thing that she set aside during Pyrope’s visit.

=========

It is, ironically, at the bottom of a bottle that she discovers the feeling she set aside during Pyrope’s visit.

It’s a mix of things. 

Anger.

Betrayal. 

bewilderment.

hurt.

sadness 

  
  
  


The vomiting that ensues is only partially due to the tequila. She doesn’t want to give it too much credit, although she has heard that it does induce that effect even more than other types of alcohol. No, her emotions are definitely what caused this, she thinks, as she kneels in front of the toilet and sobs hard enough that she nearly chokes on her own bile.  
  
That would have been bad. 

Pulmonary aspiration can be deadly.

=========

Signing up for driving school costs a lot of money. Not that Rose cares much. She stays sober for long enough to take the lessons and remember them, and to pass the driving test. 

The same day she receives her license, she buys herself a small, inexpensive car, complete with insurance. It sits in the driveway. She starts it up every week, as she has been advised by strangers on the internet to do, and does not go anywhere.

She isn’t sure why she thought that it would change anything. The problem was never with her ability to operate a vehicle.

=========

Rose is not sure what to do about the fact that she has run out of alcohol. She hadn’t thought she was burning through it that fast, but, well, her mother’s reserves _were_ limited, despite their size. It’s been a year. Maybe she should be proud of herself for not drinking herself to death, or for going through it as slowly as she did. 

Yes, she decides to be proud of herself for this. Things could have been worse.

The only problem is, she’s out of alcohol. And she’s underage, so it’s not like she can get more.

Rose braces herself for withdrawals.

=========

It’s not that bad.

She tells herself it’s not that bad. _This_ is not that bad. She knew what she was getting herself into when she started this ( _did she?_ ) and she’s made her bed, so now she will need to lie in it. Her actions have consequences, and the consequences of her actions are cravings that make her whole body shake, and more vomiting.  
  
Perhaps she could have obtained more alcohol, if she’d really tried. She very much wants it, or at least craves it. (Craving it means that whether or not she _wants_ it is irrelevant.) But she doesn’t know anyone who would buy it for her, and it’s not like her license does much other than verify she can, in fact, drive.

So it’s not that bad. She can handle this. She can deal with this.

=========

The house is covered in a layer of dust. Rose did not realize how much dust until now. Thirteen months and a smattering of days since her mother left- possibly more, since Rose has never been sure of the exact date of her departure- there is a thick layer of powdered white over every surface in the house that Rose does not directly and regularly touch. She hasn’t been motivated to do anything but keep her room, her bathroom, and the kitchenette clean, and even then that’s fallen by the wayside over the past month or so, as she’s dealt with breaking her addiction. 

(She’s able to recognize it as an addiction. It’s not like she ever denied what it was. She just didn’t think about it.) 

Maybe it’s been longer. Alcohol fucks with her memory like that.

Rose doesn’t particularly care to do anything about the dust. The motes are pretty, when sunlight filters in through the floor to ceiling windows in the living room. The atmosphere it creates is… fitting. 

It is, after all, her mausoleum.

=========

Rose conducts an idle search for therapists in the area, spurred on by a post on a subreddit she’s been poking into lately. The people on it have dealt with similar problems as her, although not exactly the same, and the internet provides an extra layer of anonymity that removes the discomfort she feels at the idea of attending some sort of group support meeting. Someone mentioned, oddly offhandedly and on a completely unrelated post, that they’d seen a therapist because of their mother abandoning them at fourteen, and the cogs in the parts of Rose’s mind that haven’t seen the light of day since she was a child(legally speaking, anyways) creak and begin to turn.

=========

The therapist before her looks at her as though she is a fascinating experiment. Something to be dissected. She empathizes uncomfortably much with the feeling, and muses on the fact that she must have made her friends absolutely miserable with her insistence on treating them like fixable problems. She never truly considered the idea that she would ever be the one under the microscope, and she finds that she intensely dislikes it, now that she’s here.

She drops that therapist after her first appointment, and thanks her pragmatic reticence that she didn’t say anything particularly incriminating during their single session.

Three more therapists drop the ball before Rose finds one that asks why she’s here and makes her actually think about it.  
  
The others have asked, of course. Or told. Told her to tell them why she’s there. Demanding answers. Like she’s a child who needs to justify herself to them, to justify wasting their time with her insignificant _feelings._

This one asks like they want to know the answer. Their eyes are a pale shade of grey that’s almost white, and their stare is calm, but… not dispassionate. Poised. Their hands are folded in their lap, and their head cocks to the side. They ask again when she doesn’t answer.  
  
“Why are you here, Miss Lalonde?”  
  
It’s uncomfortable and welcome, to be called by her last name. The last few therapists all addressed her by her first name, and it felt too familiar. She feels like she’s being asked by a peer. A curious peer, that takes her seriously.

“I don’t know.”

  
  
The therapist smiles for the first time, and Rose is bewildered by the fact that it doesn’t feel condescending or patronizing. 

“Would you like to find out?”

  
  
  


Rose thinks that yes, she would.

=========

Rose gives the house to a set of six adults- romantically and platonically entangled, though she doesn’t get the details because she doesn’t ask- that needs it more than she does. They contacted her based on her ad placed online(though she also paid to place it in the newspaper, on the off chance that anyone reads the physical paper anymore) and asked her if she was on the level about it. She showed them the house, gave them a tour of everything except her bedroom, and told them what the property taxes would be per month and then per year. Pyrope helped her draw it all up after they contacted her.  
  
The deed was signed over to them within a week. 

Rose put all of her larger possessions into storage and checked into a hotel with a suitcase of clothes and her laptop.

Being away from that place already feels like a set of iron bands has been removed from her chest. She no longer feels the constant ache to get rid of her anxiety through any means possible or necessary. Her therapist was right- being in that place wasn’t good for her.

It feels good to be rid of it. Even if she has no idea where she’s going, now. She’s free.  
  
=========

As it turns out, she does miss her mother.

This is an unpleasant realization.

Her therapist watches her rip into a pillow in a fashion that is, in hindsight, both embarrassingly undignified and very frightening. She doesn’t feel in control of herself, but it’s a _present_ feeling of lack of control, unlike the automaton-like nature of the motions she’s been guiding herself through for the past two years. She’s nineteen now, and this is the first true tantrum she’s had since she was six.

It is intensely cathartic. There is stuffing all over the room- her teeth are sharp, her hands and arms are strong, and the pillow is cheap and weak- and she stands over it, panting, and _relishes_ the anger. It courses through her veins and she is crying and she can’t look at her therapist, but.  
  
Nothing bad happened.

No reprimand was forthcoming. No consequences for her actions, other than a ruined piece of minor upholstery that her therapist assures her can be easily replaced. Her mother was not there to tell her that ladies don’t act like that, or to yell at her, or simply comment that she is being dramatic, before ignoring her. She is crying, still, but laughing, too. She feels light and floaty, the remains of her anger…. dissipating. Not ignored. Not shoved into the little box she usually keeps it in, or set aside for an ambiguous date which she secretly knows will never come. It has been expressed, and right now, that is enough.

Rose hates her mother. Rose _hates_ her mother.

But it’s okay to miss her, too.

=========

Untangling the mess of her emotions, much like the many yarn projects she’s needed to set straight in the past, is a difficult and time-consuming project. She doesn’t feel ready to face her friends yet. Not after two and a half years of ignoring them and refusing to acknowledge her own hurt.

It feels like an abscess that she has been ignoring has been removed, an infection that has been lanced and let drain. She still hurts. But she feels like, for the first time in a long time, it hurts slightly less, and that there is hope of the hurt lessening in the future, too. 

Still, she has to figure out how to get there. The future, that is. That’s something she’s been working on with her therapist. They’re very helpful. Rose is very, very grateful to them. She’s reasonably certain that she never would have escaped that house without them. 

=========

Moving away is hard. Saying goodbye to her therapist is harder. But she doesn’t want to stay in New York. She wants to get as far away from her mausoleum as possible.  
  
As far away as possible, turns out to be Maple Valley.  
  
Rose has gotten better at actually _analyzing_ her feelings, due to therapy. Before, she could hardly approach them, although she knew their causes and effects. Her focus was on minimizing the damage they caused. Now, she knows that she moves to Maple Valley because she wants to be close to John, even though she has no idea if he still lives there or not. 

She has his address. It is less than a ten minute drive away. She didn’t move in to his exact suburb, but she’s close enough that it tempts her to just… show up.  
  
Rose is good at resisting temptation.  
  


  
  


Usually.


End file.
